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Some centuries ago, there were periods when many people would get accused of consorting with the devil, and multiple witnesses would be brought forward to subst

by pekk 12y ago

Some centuries ago, there were periods when many people would get accused of consorting with the devil, and multiple witnesses would be brought forward to substantiate this, and many people were burned as a result. That's not just a problem of ancient superstition; as recently as the 90s, a number of people were convicted of Satanic Ritual Abuse, with multiple witnesses, and some of the real victims (often women working in places like daycare centers) have been in jail for decades on the basis of clearly unbelievable and coached testimony. Whenever one of these periods occurs, it's not a one-off act by some individual, nor even a matter of any specific religion. It's a clear indication that the justice system has been fundamentally compromised in the way it treats evidence and renders a final judgement. This article might have good intentions, but its method could be applied to witchcraft or Satanic Ritual Abuse, and obtain the same kinds of conclusions: If you're accused of witchcraft by multiple people, you're probably guilty. This is still mostly true if we don't believe that witches are a separate kind of people. Increasing our certainty that witches are witches is even good for the people who are accused of being witches. Counting up the number of accusations is clearly a wrong standard for determining that someone is guilty. The available evidence in each case matters, and accusations are not necessarily independent. The general presumption of innocence until proven guilty is still necessary and still applies to rape as to other crimes.

jmount 12y ago
I agree. A large count at best proves non-independence (or contamination). It really doesn't address if the contamination is a guilty party, a smear campaign or self-correlating accusations. The original article gave too much credence to the possibility of calculation solving this by even trying to work things as far as it did.
- Retra 12y ago
  That was my first thought on reading the title: a million accusations is no better than one unless you can prove they are independent.
philwelch 12y ago
The difference being that witchcraft and satanism were moral panics that never actually happened to anyone, and rape is something that actually happens to real people fairly often.
- darkhorn 12y ago
  Nowadays many rapes are the kind of sex where at the beginning everything goes normal and then for some reason the guy dumps the female.
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    [citation needed] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape#FBI_statistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape#FBI_st...
- Crito 12y ago
  It is a mistake to believe that theistic Satanists or witches (ie, people who genuinely believed that they had "communed with the devil" or possessed some form of supernatural powers) did not exist. Of course there is absolutely no evidence of ritualistic satanic abuse specifically, but there is little reason to conclude that "witches" in Salem are not plausible. That is one of the reasons why the long-established comparison between McCarthyism and the Salem Witch Trials is so apt. It is not beyond reason that there were people in Hollywood who were genuinely communists; there are communists in just about any profession today that you can think of, just as there were in the early 20th century. Hell, some of them may have even been Soviet agents; we know that Soviet agents operating in the US is something that happened. The fact that communists did in fact exist does absolutely nothing to excuse the flawed methodology that was used to track down and label communists.
- s_q_b 12y ago
  It is a mistake to believe that moral panics regarding sexual assault never occur. That's precisely what the satanic (sexual) ritual abuse trials were. Because the Department of Justice says that a female is one third more likely to be raped not attending college than on a college campus I'd say it is at least possible we're in the midst of a moral panic over sexual assaults on college campuses. The lack of reliable data, which places the number of campus sexual assaults somewhere in the wildly varying range of .08% to 20% of the population, the pseudo-religious "with-us-or-against-us" mentality, the desire to see justice done extralegally rather than in a court, and the vitriolic shaming of dissenting voices all have the flavor of a moral panic. The mob-based tribal thinking that "if he's been accused more than once, he must be guilty" is an inherent flaw in human reasoning, of which this program is simply a mathematical model. Mathematically, the fatal flaw of the model is that it assumes all accusations are supported by evidence of an arbitrary positive weight, and that all accusations are independent. This is never the almost never the case in real accusations. Perhaps before dropping out of school he should read up on other misuses of statistics that have manipulated juries and ruined lives, like the famous "Prosecutor's Fallacy." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy, which quite literally lead to the death of British Solicitor Sally Clark. What saddens me most is that some casual readers are now walking around with the incredibly mistaken assumption that it is mathematically sound to assume a person accused thrice is virtually certain to be guilty. I don't say any of this to diminish the very real problem of sexual assault, but merely to point out that people are surrendering their rights and their reason to mob mentality. That mentality is precisely what two thousand years of legal scholarship evolved to fight. And whether executed by silicon or scythe, mob mentality is wrong. And quite frankly it is frightening to watch.
drcomputer 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
e40 12y ago
Exhibit A: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial I remember watching the Frontline reports of this. There were several over a few years and I was just flabbergasted as to how amazingly stupid people where to believe this. That no one in the prosecutors office put the brakes on it. Really sad.
- trhway 12y ago
  >"In order to guarantee his testimony during the McMartin case, Freeman was given immunity to previous charges of perjury." hard to read it strait-faced.
mathattack 12y ago
You're onto something - there's a correlation between variables when coaching (intentional or not) is involved.
ThrustVectoring 12y ago
Legal evidence has to be more strict than Bayesian evidence - even if you've seen enough to be convinced that they probably committed some crime, you need to have a system where proof is required. The alternative is that it gets trivially easy to railroad people with the justice system.

by pekk 12y ago

jmount 12y ago

I agree. A large count at best proves non-independence (or contamination). It really doesn't address if the contamination is a guilty party, a smear campaign or self-correlating accusations. The original article gave too much credence to the possibility of calculation solving this by even trying to work things as far as it did.

Retra 12y ago
That was my first thought on reading the title: a million accusations is no better than one unless you can prove they are independent.

philwelch 12y ago

The difference being that witchcraft and satanism were moral panics that never actually happened to anyone, and rape is something that actually happens to real people fairly often.

darkhorn 12y ago
Nowadays many rapes are the kind of sex where at the beginning everything goes normal and then for some reason the guy dumps the female.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  [citation needed] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape#FBI_statistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape#FBI_st...
Crito 12y ago
It is a mistake to believe that theistic Satanists or witches (ie, people who genuinely believed that they had "communed with the devil" or possessed some form of supernatural powers) did not exist. Of course there is absolutely no evidence of ritualistic satanic abuse specifically, but there is little reason to conclude that "witches" in Salem are not plausible. That is one of the reasons why the long-established comparison between McCarthyism and the Salem Witch Trials is so apt. It is not beyond reason that there were people in Hollywood who were genuinely communists; there are communists in just about any profession today that you can think of, just as there were in the early 20th century. Hell, some of them may have even been Soviet agents; we know that Soviet agents operating in the US is something that happened. The fact that communists did in fact exist does absolutely nothing to excuse the flawed methodology that was used to track down and label communists.
s_q_b 12y ago
It is a mistake to believe that moral panics regarding sexual assault never occur. That's precisely what the satanic (sexual) ritual abuse trials were. Because the Department of Justice says that a female is one third more likely to be raped not attending college than on a college campus I'd say it is at least possible we're in the midst of a moral panic over sexual assaults on college campuses. The lack of reliable data, which places the number of campus sexual assaults somewhere in the wildly varying range of .08% to 20% of the population, the pseudo-religious "with-us-or-against-us" mentality, the desire to see justice done extralegally rather than in a court, and the vitriolic shaming of dissenting voices all have the flavor of a moral panic. The mob-based tribal thinking that "if he's been accused more than once, he must be guilty" is an inherent flaw in human reasoning, of which this program is simply a mathematical model. Mathematically, the fatal flaw of the model is that it assumes all accusations are supported by evidence of an arbitrary positive weight, and that all accusations are independent. This is never the almost never the case in real accusations. Perhaps before dropping out of school he should read up on other misuses of statistics that have manipulated juries and ruined lives, like the famous "Prosecutor's Fallacy." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy, which quite literally lead to the death of British Solicitor Sally Clark. What saddens me most is that some casual readers are now walking around with the incredibly mistaken assumption that it is mathematically sound to assume a person accused thrice is virtually certain to be guilty. I don't say any of this to diminish the very real problem of sexual assault, but merely to point out that people are surrendering their rights and their reason to mob mentality. That mentality is precisely what two thousand years of legal scholarship evolved to fight. And whether executed by silicon or scythe, mob mentality is wrong. And quite frankly it is frightening to watch.

drcomputer 12y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

e40 12y ago

Exhibit A: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial I remember watching the Frontline reports of this. There were several over a few years and I was just flabbergasted as to how amazingly stupid people where to believe this. That no one in the prosecutors office put the brakes on it. Really sad.

trhway 12y ago
>"In order to guarantee his testimony during the McMartin case, Freeman was given immunity to previous charges of perjury." hard to read it strait-faced.

mathattack 12y ago

You're onto something - there's a correlation between variables when coaching (intentional or not) is involved.

ThrustVectoring 12y ago

Legal evidence has to be more strict than Bayesian evidence - even if you've seen enough to be convinced that they probably committed some crime, you need to have a system where proof is required. The alternative is that it gets trivially easy to railroad people with the justice system.